Presenting: Mister Elegance

This, Dear Readers, is Mister Elegance. For those who can’t see, he’s a mostly black cat, sitting hunched over with one hind leg (with a white foot) stuck forward a little awkwardly. You don’t notice it much when he’s walking, but when he sits, that leg always sticks out oddly. I call him Mr. Elegance, because he’s always making a leg.

It is exceedingly clever.

This, Dear Readers, is Mister Elegance. For those who can't see, he's a mostly black cat, sitting hunched over with one hind leg (with a white foot) stuck forward a little awkwardly. You don't notice it much when he's walking, but when he sits, that leg always sticks out oddly.

Mr. Elegance is one of a few cats (and foxes) that wander through my little corner of Dublin, and while most of them seem to have homes (keep your cats indoors, if you value your ecosystem), I get the impression that Mr. Elegance is on his own in the world. In this next picture, you can see him trying to get a grip on a misshapen toilet paper tube.

The cat's leg is still stuck out, but now his head is sideways on the moss, as he tries to get a good angle on the cardboard tube

He likes to hang out on the roof of my shed, which is right outside my window. It’s covered in moss and twigs, and gets some sun during the day. I put some catnip in the cardboard tube, and tossed it down onto the roof for him. In this next picture, you can see that he’s gripping the tube in both front paws, and biting it very ferociously.

He first showed up a couple years ago. We already have one cat, who doesn’t play well with others, and it’s a small flat. We also can’t really afford another cat, so we have to settle for being friendly, and supplying drugs. In the next picture, he’s rabbit-kicking the tube, but his face looks a little bored.

There was a period of almost a year when we didn’t see him around, and we worried about him. I suppose it’s not good news for the birds, but I was glad when he showed up again. In the next  picture, he’s dropping the tube, and looking up at me, looking down at him.

After he’d gotten his fill of catnip, he settled down for a nap, still sticking that leg out.

Happy International Bee Day! Have a documentary about wild European bees!

Work on the novel continues, so in honor of International Bee Day, I wanted to share this documentary about Europe’s wild bees. When people talk about the bees dying, it’s specifically the wild bees that are really suffering, so I think it’s worth learning a little about them. I have some wildflowers growing in planters (finding a place for them turned out to be unreasonably difficult), so I’ll share some pictures of those as they begin to flower. It’s hard to say how much my efforts will help, if at all, but I’m far from alone in making the effort, and it’s nice to do at least something concrete, even if it’s not much.

 

They’re just like me! Hammerhead Sharks Hold Breath for Deep Dives

So, I don’t know a whole lot about fish. I can identify a few, and I know about cool stuff like that warm-blooded fish, or the fact that fish aren’t real, but I don’t know, for example, how their gills actually function. I did not know, for example, that it’s apparently possible for sharks to hold their breath?

This was a complete surprise!” said Mark Royer, lead author and researcher with the Shark Research Group at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. “It was unexpected for sharks to hold their breath to hunt like a diving marine mammal. It is an extraordinary behavior from an incredible animal.”

Shark gills are natural radiators that would rapidly cool the blood, muscles and organs if scalloped hammerhead sharks did not close their gill slits during deep dives into cold water. These sharks are warm water animals but feed at depths where seawater temperatures are similar to those found in Kodiak Alaska (around 5°C/40°F), yet they need to keep their bodies warm in order to hunt effectively.

“Although it is obvious that air-breathing marine mammals hold their breath while diving, we did not expect to see sharks exhibiting similar behavior,” said Royer. “This previously unobserved behavior reveals that scalloped hammerhead sharks have feeding strategies that are broadly similar to those of some marine mammals, like pilot whales. Both have evolved to exploit deep dwelling prey and do so by holding their breath to access these physically challenging environments for short periods.”

Marine mammals hold their breath because they can’t breath water. The sharks have no problem breathing, but the “air” is so cold down there that they’re better off holding their breath. I’d always had the vague impression that fish breathing was even more reflexive than human breathing, since gills don’t “hold” water, but I suppose it makes sense that with so much musculature going on, they’d have control over their gills. I’m now wondering if the hammerheads living around the Sharkcano do the same thing to keep from overheating or burning their gills sometimes.

Beyond the fun of learning something new about hammerhead sharks, I also appreciate this article for giving us a window into how scientists are able to figure this sort of thing out:

The research team discovered this unexpected phenomenon by equipping deep-diving scalloped hammerhead sharks with devices that simultaneously measured their muscle temperature, depth, body orientation and activity levels. They saw that their muscles stayed warm throughout their dive into deep cold water but suddenly cooled as the sharks approached the surface toward the end of each dive. Computer modeling suggested that hammerhead sharks must be preventing heat loss from their gills to keep their bodies warm during these deep-dives into cold water.

Additionally, video of a scalloped hammerhead shark swimming along the seabed at a depth of 1,044 meters (more than 3,400 feet) showed its gill slits tightly closed, whereas similar images from surface waters show these sharks swimming with their gill slits wide open. A sudden cooling in muscle temperature as scalloped hammerhead sharks approach the surface at the end of each dive suggests that they opened their gill slits to resume breathing while still in relatively cool water.

“Holding their breath keeps scalloped hammerhead sharks warm but also shuts off their oxygen supply,” said Royer. “So, although these sharks hold their breath for an average of 17 minutes, they only spend an average of four minutes at the bottom of their dives at extreme depths before quickly returning to warmer, well-oxygenated surface waters where breathing resumes.”

Thermal regulation by cold-blooded animals has always fascinated me. When I was a volunteer at the New England Aquarium, I saw sea turtles that had ended up in too-cold water, and gotten internal frostbite, which is one horror I’m glad I don’t have to worry about. I’ve always though that being unable to internally regulate temperature was limiting, and in some ways it definitely is. Simply having food allows us to comfortably function in a pretty wide temperature range, and by adding clothes (or thicker fur/feathers if you’re not human), you can expand that range pretty cheaply. It seems, however, that I’ve been underestimating our room-temperature brethren. I would imagine this sort of thing is easier with a larger body, but I’m now curious what other tricks there might be for accessing places that “ought” to be too hot or too cold.

 

The image shows a school of scalloped hammerhead sharks, photographed from below. The sharks seem to be mostly silhouetted, but you can see the sunlight, filtered blue by the water, reflecting off their sides. Photo uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ryan Espanto

The image shows a school of scalloped hammerhead sharks, photographed from below. The sharks seem to be mostly silhouetted, but you can see the sunlight, filtered blue by the water, reflecting off their sides. Photo uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ryan Espanto

Video: The Weimar Fallacy

With the rise of fascism in the United States, a lot of people have been comparing the current era to the Weimar Republic, in the years prior to Nazi rule. I think it’s a reasonable comparison to make, and I’ve made it myself. I think there are things we can learn from studying that history, but it’s also worth remembering that 21st century US is not, in fact Weimar Germany. The Three Arrows video I posted last August goes into both similarities and differences, and it’s definitely worth a watch, but I like the Lonerbox video below, as an explicit discussion of the differences.

I’m used to thinking of the United States as a young country, and in some ways it is, but it’s worth remembering that as states claiming to be democracies go, it’s quite old. The band Rammstein put out a song called Deutschland a little while back which made the point (among other things) that for all Germany can trace its history back for centuries, it seems like it’s always a very young country. Germany as we know it today is younger than I am, and it was preceded by the era of a divided East and West Germany, which was preceded by the Nazis, which was preceded by Weimar, which was preceded by the empire, each being not just a different regime, but in many ways a different country. To quote Deutschland, Germany is “so young, and yet so old.”

This video digs into what went on during the short years of the Republic, and how, in many ways, it’s nothing at all like what’s happening in the US today.

Potential Pollinator Hints at New Frontiers in Froggery!

If I asked a random person to name a pollinator, most people would probably default to “bees”. This is perfectly reasonable. Bees play a huge role in human life, and the decline in wild bees has rightfully caused a great deal of alarm. Today, however, we’re going to step back from the horrors of the world, and instead look at remarkable news from the wonderful world of pollination. Die-hard fans of plant sex will already be aware that pollinators come in all shapes and sizes. There are plenty of insects other than bees that pollinate, and a number of birds and mammals, but I have to admit that until today, I had never heard of a frog acting as a pollinator!

The image shows golden-brown frog with a pinkish-white belly and throat, clinging to a flower and chowing down on it. From Scientific American: The Xenohyla truncata tree frog was observed eating various plant parts and having pollen stuck to its back, pointing to a possible role in pollination. Credit: Henrique Nogueira

The image shows golden-brown frog with a pinkish-white belly and throat, clinging to a flower and chowing down on it. From Scientific American: The Xenohyla truncata tree frog was observed eating various plant parts and having pollen stuck to its back, pointing to a possible role in pollination. Credit: Henrique Nogueira

On rainy nights on the verdant coastal plains outside Rio de Janeiro, groups of tree frogs sometimes gather around the pearly white flowers of the milk fruit tree. But while most tree frogs are on the prowl for night-flying insects, one species is after the sugary nectar in the flowers. The tiny, orange Xenohyla truncata’s sweet tooth might make it the world’s first known pollinating amphibian. And the discovery adds to growing evidence that we need to broaden our understanding of which animals act as pollinators beyond the well-known birds and insects.During a visit to a spot near the Brazilian town of Armação dos Búzios in December 2020, researchers witnessed a group of the frogs—commonly known as Izecksohn’s Brazilian tree frog—feeding on milk fruit. The stomach contents of museum specimens had previously shown that the species is one of the few amphibians in the world to eat fruit, says team member Carlos Henrique de-Oliveira-Nogueira, a biologist at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. The researchers saw one of the frogs wiggle into a flower in search of nectar, then emerge with pollen clinging to the secretions on its moist back. This led them to suggest that the amphibians might play a role in carrying pollen from bloom to bloom, aiding the tree’s reproduction. The team’s findings recently appeared in Food Webs. “Some species are photographed in flowers, but nobody’s ever seen a species interacting with a flower,” de-Oliveira-Nogueira says.

So far, they haven’t proved that the frogs do pollinate, but they have shown that the potential is there. To me, it seems more likely than not that these frogs must pollinate the plants at least sometimes, whether or not they play a major role in the milk flower’s continuation as a species. Apparently testing that is the next step, as the researchers plan to enclose flowers in cages to exclude frogs. If the caged flowers don’t get pollinated, then either they depend on the frogs, or there’s something else that’s frog-sized or bigger, that the researchers haven’t considered. I’m holding out for a snake, because that would probably be the weirdest option.

There are also questions about the frog’s back secretions. Do they interact with the pollen, beyond providing a sticky surface? As the researchers say, they could actually be damaging the pollen, in which case, maybe the caged flowers will do better? Or maybe they damage the pollen, but the plant still depends on the frogs, despite that. I expect we’ll probably hear more about this in the future. Not only is this a potentially exciting discovery, it also gives a great excuse to post pictures of frogs in flowers.

The image shows a golden-brown frog (fading to yellow, at the toes), face-first in a white flower. You can just see the edge of one of the frog's bulbous eyes behind the out-of-focus bit of flower in the foreground of the picture. From Scientific American: X. truncata within a Cordia taguahyensis flower.

The image shows a golden-brown frog (fading to yellow, at the toes), face-first in a white flower. You can just see the edge of one of the frog’s bulbous eyes behind the out-of-focus bit of flower in the foreground of the picture. From Scientific American: X. truncata within a Cordia taguahyensis flower.

Video: The “Darwin’s Finch” of Mammals

So, last April, I posted a video about tenrecs. They’re neat little creatures that live in Madagascar, that I’ve like since I was a kid. I’m not certain, but I think I first read about them in the magazine Ranger Rick. When I say “like”, I think it’s worth noting that I mean in an aesthetic sense. If I “liked” them by learning about them, I probably wouldn’t have made this post.

I’ve always thought of tenrecs as insectivores – basically a form of shrew, but given their location, I suppose I should have known better. It turns out that they’re in the very, very small group of placental mammals that have a cloaca (apparently some actual shrews have one, which I also did not know). One way in which they’re very different from shrews, is that they have a slower metabolism, which means that while some shrews can starve to death within a 24 hour period, tenrecs, presumably including ancestral tenrecs, could survive the 400 kilometer sea journey from mainland Africa to Madagascar. I called them the “Darwin’s Finch” of mammals in the title, because since arriving on that island, they’ve branched out into a surprising diversity of body forms and ecological niches. The upside of neglecting to learn everything about organisms I like, is that I get to keep learning cool new facts about them, and take some of you along for the ride!

Video: Are Giraffes OP?

I’m focused on finishing the first draft of my current novel this month, so there’s a decent chance that I’ll have a few more days on which I end up not having much of a blog post. All of this is to say, I’m going to leave you with Tier Zoo, to explore the question of whether or not giraffes are overpowered.

How “AI” Technology Can Dramatically Increase Research Speed

While I’m still a bit leery of the art, I think my real problem with most of the stuff we’re calling “AI” is the context in which it exists, same as with other forms of automation. There’s also a reasonable concern about the energy requirements of this technology, but today we’re going to look at one of the was in which it could be a huge benefit to all of us.

The development of computing machines in the 20th century made a lot of things possible, including new avenues and scales of research. The climate models that have, despite what you may have heard, done a surprisingly good job at projecting future warming, needed the capabilities of computers. Like its predecessors, this new AI technology opens up new approaches to research that were previously off the table.

An artificial intelligence system enables robots to conduct autonomous scientific experiments—as many as 10,000 per day—potentially driving a drastic leap forward in the pace of discovery in areas from medicine to agriculture to environmental science.

Reported today in Nature Microbiology, the team was led by a professor now at the University of Michigan.

That artificial intelligence platform, dubbed BacterAI, mapped the metabolism of two microbes associated with oral health—with no baseline information to start with. Bacteria consume some combination of the 20 amino acids needed to support life, but each species requires specific nutrients to grow. The U-M team wanted to know what amino acids are needed by the beneficial microbes in our mouths so they can promote their growth.

“We know almost nothing about most of the bacteria that influence our health. Understanding how bacteria grow is the first step toward reengineering our microbiome,” said Paul Jensen, U-M assistant professor of biomedical engineering who was at the University of Illinois when the project started.

Figuring out the combination of amino acids that bacteria like is tricky, however. Those 20 amino acids yield more than a million possible combinations, just based on whether each amino acid is present or not. Yet BacterAI was able to discover the amino acid requirements for the growth of both Streptococcus gordonii and Streptococcus sanguinis.

To find the right formula for each species, BacterAI tested hundreds of combinations of amino acids per day, honing its focus and changing combinations each morning based on the previous day’s results. Within nine days, it was producing accurate predictions 90% of the time.

Unlike conventional approaches that feed labeled data sets into a machine-learning model, BacterAI creates its own data set through a series of experiments. By analyzing the results of previous trials, it comes up with predictions of what new experiments might give it the most information. As a result, it figured out most of the rules for feeding bacteria with fewer than 4,000 experiments.

“When a child learns to walk, they don’t just watch adults walk and then say ‘Ok, I got it,’ stand up, and start walking. They fumble around and do some trial and error first,” Jensen said.

“We wanted our AI agent to take steps and fall down, to come up with its own ideas and make mistakes. Every day, it gets a little better, a little smarter.”

Little to no research has been conducted on roughly 90% of bacteria, and the amount of time and resources needed to learn even basic scientific information about them using conventional methods is daunting. Automated experimentation can drastically speed up these discoveries. The team ran up to 10,000 experiments in a single day.

This is the kind of thing that could, at least in theory, lead to the rapid development of new antibiotics – something we definitely need. I think the odds are good that even without using robots to do experiments, this technology could accelerate a great many fields of research. I’m not looking for some kind of magical tech “solution” to climate change or pollution, but there’s a real possibility that advances due to this tech could enable us to survive conditions in the future, which would destroy us in the present.

Of course, that all depends on who gets to decide what kind of research is prioritized, and what is sidelined. Our technology may give us the ability to do marvelous things, but it will never fix the injustice, inequality, and suffering that are a deliberate outcome of our current political and economic system. Technology won’t ever remove the need for revolution, all it will do is change the landscape in which we fight.

Unequal Protection: Jordan Neely Killing Highlights White Supremacy Ingrained in US Society

A while back, I talked about NY mayor Eric Adams’ plan to round up and forcibly commit unhoused people deemed “mentally ill”. Part of my point was that it’s disturbingly easy for police, mental institutions, and the courts, to label someone who’s perfectly rational as “crazy”, and then force them into situations that are virtually designed to destroy a person’s mental health:

They had the means to verify what she was saying, but instead they dismissed all of it as delusions, forced her to take powerful psychoactive drugs, and demanded that she convincingly lie about herself before she be released:

According to the New York Daily News, a treatment plan for Ms Brock at the hospital states: ‘Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.’

This was torture. They imprisoned a person, and for nine days they told her she was insane. They forcibly drugged her, and denied her reality over, and over and over again for days. And then, one day, they gave her discharge papers, and put her out the back door of the hospital. A few days later, she got a bill for $13,000 worth of “treatment”. The idea of holding anyone criminally responsible for this nightmare was apparently never even on the table, so she went with the option left to her – she sued them.

And lost in 2019.

Brock began sobbing as the verdict was read.

“It’s reasonable for them to diagnose me with bipolar even though I’m telling the truth?” Brock said through tears.

“What am I supposed to do? I’m crazy because of this verdict.”

In the United States of America, it is apparently legal for police to decide that you’re “in need of medical treatment”, restrain, drug, and imprison you, and for doctors to keep you prisoner, keep you drugged, and demand that you deny reality because they said so. Not only is it legal, it’s apparently barely newsworthy. I could only find two articles online that followed up on Kam Brock’s story, and I needed a VPN to read them because they’re geo-restricted to the U.S., like so much other “local news” that’s not considered worth a larger platform. How can this be?

Well, I suspect that, aside from the ever-present white supremacy in our law enforcement system, it’s because it’s considered perfectly acceptable to do all of that to “crazy” people. Solitary confinement, assault, sexual assault, some of the most powerful psychoactive drugs available – all are just routine parts of how our society deals with mental illness, to the point where all of this can happen, triggered by some cop deciding to hassle the black woman in the expensive car, and it’s barely newsworthy that a court, as Brock said, ruled that she was “crazy”.

It’s even more horrifying when you consider what this means for the rest of Brock’s life. It’s now a legal fact that she’s “crazy”. The torture inflicted on her was ruled by the courts to be just fine. That means that if this, or something like this happens again, there is legal precedent that it’s OK to imprison and torture this woman. Any legal dispute she’s in in the future will have this hanging over it. Any time she has a negligent or vindictive landlord, or a dispute with a neighbor, or is wrongfully fired, it could make that nightmare happen again. Crying seems like a pretty reasonable response.

Remember how we saw, over the last few years, the way white women have been able to weaponize white supremacy to sic cops on black people? Brock now has to deal with that, plus the legal declaration that she’s crazy. Practically anyone has the power to get her locked up at any time, for any reason, because some cop decided to pull her over.

It’s made worse by the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, mental health has always had a political dimension to it, and just as white supremacy didn’t end when the Civil Rights Act was passed, the politicization of sanity and the stigma against people with mental illness – sanism – is also very much alive and well within the systems that govern the people of the United States.

I think any person who’s reasonably well-informed can understand that it’s not possible to honestly discuss the US “justice” system, without also discussing white supremacy. Likewise, the history of mental health, in the US, is also steeped in white supremacy. There’s a quote I like throwing around, from a composer named Frank Wilhoit:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, along side out-groups whom the law binds, but does not protect

When you consider conservative policy and rhetoric, I think it’s important to keep “Wilhoit’s Law” in mind. When we hear about a plan to forcibly commit “mentally ill” unhoused people, it’s important to remember that in the United States, the law is never applied equally. That’s part of why so many well-off white conservatives are happy to draft laws limiting people’s rights – experience has taught them that the “spirit of the law” isn’t really meant to apply to them. They get a scolding for drug use, or a slap on the wrist for rape, while a black kid can be locked up for years, without trial or plea, on suspicion of maybe stealing a backpack.

We are working to change the world, but as we do so, we also have to deal with the world as it is, and in this world, equal protection under the law does not exist.

Race isn’t the only dynamic here, either. We’ve already discussed mental illness, and the way that label can be forced onto people, but I think it’s worth spending a little more time on the consequences of that. There’s stigma associated, of course, and that can be a problem, but it gets much, much worse. Above, we already saw how it’s apparently fine drug, imprison, and torture someone because of a “reasonable belief” that they’re mentally ill. If this feels familiar to the “reasonable belief” of danger that cops use to justify killing, that’s because it is. This extends beyond cops, too – when a white person kills a black person, the same defenses often crop up as when a cop kills a black person. Remember – in-groups whom the law protects, but does not bind. And that’s how you end up with a white man slowly killing a black man while a subway car of people look on, and not only did the NYPD not arrest him, news outlets praised him, while denigrating the murdered man. From the New York Post:

Dramatic new video shows a straphanger taking matters into his own hands, pinning down an unhinged man in a deadly incident at a Manhattan subway station this week.

The 24-year-old passenger stepped in after the vagrant, identified by sources as Jordan Neely, 30, began going on an aggressive rant on a northbound F train Monday afternoon, according to police and a witness who took the video.

Neely was “ranting” about the fact that he was starving, and he was killed for it.

And according to the police, a number of news outlets, and a lot of shitty people on the internet, that’s just fine. You see, in the United States, black lives often don’t matter, and the situation only gets worse when you add in mental illness. Neely apparently had a criminal record, but as illustrated above, that doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot, because cops and the courts can just decide that reality doesn’t matter, and because cops plant evidence, and arrest people for bullshit reasons. Neely was not protected by the law, but he was absolutely bound by it.

But more than that, his criminal record shouldn’t matter because nothing he did justified killing him. The man who killed Neely was, apparently, a Marine vet. According to the articles I’ve read, he held Neely in a chokehold for 15 minutes. At most, it takes 5 minutes to die from that, and I feel like a Marine, more than most people, should be aware of that. That’s why the word “murder” keeps coming to mind – if he’d choked Neely till he stopped struggling, then let go and made sure he was still alive, that would still be assault, but I’d be more inclined to believe that there was no intent to kill. By all accounts, that is not what happened.

I don’t know what was going on in the killer’s head, and at the moment I don’t really care. What matters is that we have a society in which a white man can strangle a black man to death in front of witnesses, and be allowed to walk free – in which a killer like this is not bound by the law. The news about this is going viral, so the killer may face a trial after all, and some news outlets may change the tone of their coverage. I don’t think either of those things entered the realm of possibility until activists made it impossible to ignore.

We can – must – work for change, but to do that, we must be clear about the world as it is.

 

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